Counsels of Moderation

There they go again

By LEONARD WILLIAMS, NEIL WOLLMAN & ABIGAIL A.
FULLER

Over much of the 1990s, many political pundits have espoused the
notion that the American public seeks moderation in its elected
officials. Recently they have based that judgement on the results of
a survey released by the Pew Research Center, which claims that
Americans have become more centrist, as well as more supportive of
government.

Now, some prominent politicians are making similar claims. Noting
a slightly rightward shift in the center of gravity for members of
their party caucus, some House Democrats believe that centrism is the
only way to electoral victory.

This is a very familiar refrain. Throughout the last half of this
decade, we have been told that each congressional election has
brought us a new crop of pragmatic moderates to government. But each
time those "moderates" got down to business, more and more people
have complained about how partisan policy making has become. How can
we keep electing moderates and still get ever more bitter
politics?

The answer can be found by looking at the actual results of
congressional elections. For example, many observers saw the 1994
election as a rejection of big-government liberalism. But our
analysis revealed that it was the more moderate Democratic
incumbents, not the liberal ones, who were more likely to lose their
bids for re-election in 1994 (Roll Call, 4/1/96).

After Clinton's re-election in 1996, more than a few commentators
saw the election returning American politics to the vital center.
Even though more radical Republicans were supposed to have been
tossed aside, we found that conservative Republican incumbents were
actually less likely to lose in 1996 than were moderate ones (Roll
Call, 12/12/96).

And after last year's mid-term elections, the pundits and
spin-doctors celebrated yet another "Year of the Moderate." Once
again, the claim was that moderates win and ideologues lose. But even
in a year like 1998, when few incumbents lost, our analysis showed
that ideological extremists of both parties lost their bids for
re-election at the same rate as their more moderate colleagues.

Examining the results for House elections in the Clinton years
(1992-1998), we asked whether incumbents who won re-election only did
so in cases where their political ideology matched that of their
districts. In nearly all types of districts, for Republicans and
Democrats alike, incumbents who didn't match their district ideology
(e.g., a conservative Republican running in a moderate district) were
no more likely to lose than were those who did match. These results
suggest that one can be ideologically extreme and still win even in a
moderate district.

We also looked at electoral outcomes for those incumbents running
in moderate districts who were in some jeopardy of losing their seats
(so-called "marginal districts," in which the incumbent received less
than 55 percent of the vote). Surely, incumbents who moved toward the
center in such divided districts would be more likely to win
re-election, yet our results belied the notion of any advantage for
moderate candidates.

No matter what citizens may claim about their political ideology,
and contrary to the conventional wisdom, election results from the
Clinton era suggest that voters have neither sought nor rewarded
ideological moderation by their members of Congress. And since there
never really was a push toward moderation, the lack of bipartisan
policymaking is certainly more understandable.

Recently, Rep. Calvin Dooley, D-California, was quoted in the
Washington Post as saying that the only Democrats who can win
in marginal or swing districts are moderate ones, the so-called New
Democrats. The plain fact of the matter is that both liberal
Democrats and conservative Republicans can win in such swing
districts. Indeed, our studies have shown that from the 1992 through
the 1998 elections, only 56 percent of all ideologically moderate
districts were represented by moderate incumbents.

We note our findings not only to reassess the past, but also to
point toward the future as we enter the important election year of
2000. Beware of pundits and politicians bearing messages of
moderation.

Leonard Williams is Professor of Political Science; Neil
Wollman is Professor of Psychology; and Abigail A. Fuller is
Assistant Professor of Sociology at Manchester College in North
Manchester, Ind.